If you are a fan of 1970s rock, you may know Todd Rundgren from such hits as “Hello, It’s Me,” “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” “Can We Still Be Friends?” and “I Saw The Light.”

If you are both fan and scholar of 1970s and 1980s rock, you might know him as the producer of albums by Hall & Oates, Cheap Trick, Meat Loaf, the Tubes, Grand Funk Railroad, Psychedelic Furs and New York Dolls.

And if you are a devotee of legal weed, you may know him from his marijuana strain, “Hello, It’s Weed.”

Wherever you know him from and whatever you know him for, you surely comprehend how big a deal it is that he is coming to the Clyde Theatre on September 24 to perform selections from his enormous catalog.

A writer doesn’t even know where to start with Rundgren. Musicians are often described as eclectic, but have they – after becoming irrefutably legendary rock music figures – formed star-packed Beatles and David Bowie tribute acts just because they love those artists?

Have they recorded bossa nova albums and toured in bossa nova bands just because they love that style of music?

Who but Rundgren could write and produce a song in tribute to Steely Dan (a political song spoofing a recently elected President) and then get Donald Fagan to sing on it?

It’s called “Tin Foil Hat,” by the way.

Rundgren has spent much of his career doing pretty much whatever he has wanted to do and it has worked out.

Talent is one reason this was possible, of course. Another reason was dual income streams.

Rundren made so much money as a producer in the 1970s and 1980s, he didn’t really didn’t need to worry as much as other artists did about writing hits.

He was sometimes entreated to help make hits for other artists, but he never felt the same level of pressure when making his own music.

Rundgren, in a phone interview from his home on the island of Kauai, admitted that he did sometimes write what he refers to now as autopilot songs.

“In the early days, I was doing what everybody else does, which is write about some failed relationship,” he said. “And I just wrote about it over and over and over again until I got it out of my system.”

He calls these autopilot songs because they have not held an endless fascination for him. So, there is always the danger, when he revisits them in a live setting, that he will perform these songs (unintentionally, to be sure) in a more rote fashion than he really wants to perform any music.

“That word autopilot,” he said. “I dread that. I dread, kind of, not being in the moment. Your mind drifts to other things, and you’re just…you’re not there. Your hands are doing all the work, but your mind is some other place. So, I really would rather be in the moment, if possible. So, I stopped writing about a failed relationship and tried to write about things that I was actually thinking about.”

What Rundgren was thinking about when he started producing others’ albums was getting into various studios and making some music. What he didn’t understand, early on, was the extent to which getting into studios with musicians that he hadn’t really gotten to know yet was about more than just making music.

For example, it was also about massaging egos.

“In my early days as a producer and engineer, I had no patience for it,” he said. “‘All right, all right. We’re here to make music. Cut out the drama. Let’s get to work.’ But I came to realize that a lot of acts bring issues that have nothing to do with the project into the studio, and you have to be prepared to deal with them. So, over time, I learned that being a psychologist, psychiatrist, sociologist or, you know, social worker is almost as much of a requisite as having some understanding of what the musical goals are.”

One thing he learned the hard way was to make sure the band has enough promising material to fill an album before they enter the studio.

“The worst part is when people are having their interpersonal issues and, in the middle of the session, you run out of stuff to record,” Rundgren said. “And so they all have to start being creative and cooperative in a way that they weren’t outside the studio. So, I eliminate that variable. I know that we’ve got the material to finish a record. Now, we just have to get over the various speed bumps in the way of accomplishing that.”

One of the biggest records that Rundgren produced was Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.”

If you are like me (and you are roughly as old as me), you listened to this album many times as a child.

You probably think that you know everything you could possibly know about it.

Well, Rundgren told me something that utterly transformed my perception of that album and brought about an “a-ha moment” that I am still a-ha-ing about.

He produced it as a spoof of Bruce Springsteen’s early music.

Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

Rundgren said he was motivated by some of the overwrought media hype surrounding Springsteen at the time.

“It was the fifties again,” he said. “‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ Bruce was James Dean. At the time I first heard what would turn out to be ‘Bat Out of Hell,’ it wasn’t long after Bruce Springsteen had been anointed as savior of rock and roll. And I thought, ‘Oh my gerd. Is that where we’re at? It’s deja vu all over again.'”

Rundgren said Jim Steinman’s songs had a sense of humor that lent themselves to the burlesque of rock bombast with which he wanted to imbue them.

The album was a commercial smash without anyone picking up on its spoofish aspects and Rundgren said that when he got his first enormous royalty check, he knew that the project had been much more than a lark.

One of the hit songs off that record was, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”

The truth about the intentional writing of hits and the pressure that labels used to put on artists to concoct them is that no one can purposefully create a hit, Rundgren said.

“There are so many issues with that that I’d also discovered producing other people,” he said. “You used to bank so much on having that Top 40 hit. Regardless of what kind of music you came in with, you had to leave with something that the label would consider releasing as a single. And even if you keep that in mind and you strive and do everything that you possibly can to create that thing, there’s no such thing as a hit single before it becomes a hit.”

You could have a song that everyone, including the people in the executive office, agreed would almost certainly shoot to number one and then new music from a bigger artist (often Michael Jackson, back in the day) would shove it off the chart into eternal obscurity.

Another thing that sometimes occurred, to the thoughtful producer’s consternation, is that a label would insist that a likely hit single be shoehorned onto a record rather late in the recording process. It was not unusual for that single to sound nothing like the other songs.

Most Rundgren fans probably couldn’t even guess his most enduringly popular song. It’s “Bang the Drum All Day” from his 1982 album “The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect.”

It is one of those songs that have been used repeatedly by movie studios, drivetime DJs and sports teams to get listeners in a party mood.

For a long time, a popular cruise line paid Rundgren six figures a year to use the song in their commercials.

“Then they started sinking those boats and thought they’d better change their image,” he said. “It sounded like the captain was having too much fun.”

Sometimes Rundgren writes and records a song, then someone else turns it into a hit or has a greater measure of demonstrable success with the song than Rundgren had. That’s what happened with England Dan and John Ford Coley’s version of “Love Is The Answer.”

Rundgren said he is nothing but tickled when this sort of thing happens.

“I’m always fairly flattered when somebody thinks that one of my songs is something that they’d like to have coming out of their mouth,” he said. “I never write songs for other people. I always write them to express my own feelings, my own viewpoint. So, when someone feels that it translates and that they also can identify and inhabit the message, then I feel like that the material has been effective. You know, that it’s actually reached somebody. So that’s always satisfying.”

There have been a lot of changes in the music business since Rundgren started out and, given his seemingly boundless curiosity and sense of musical adventure, it is not surprising to hear him suggest that the changes were mostly good.

What he describes as the “great unholy alliance between the record labels, radio stations and record retailers” was broken up.

“If the labels had just been more open, you know, to the possibilities of new technology and had been more cooperative in the transitioning, the disastrous effects that befell them might not have happened,” he said.

Yes, it is harder to make a living from music these days, but much easier to find an audience.

“There are more opportunities for different kinds of artists to find at least some kind of an audience or to find some kind of underwriting and, most importantly, to be able to go live and sell concert tickets and merchandise, which is essentially the old fashioned way that you made money.

“Before there were records,” Rundgren said, “we were all traveling, wandering minstrels singing a song for a penny and doing odd jobs to make up the difference. It’s gotten back to, ‘Don’t quit your day job but you have the freedom to make music any way you want.’ There are no gatekeepers in that regard anymore.”

One thing that does rankle Rundgren a little is the phenomenon of musical performers who seem to see music as a stepping stone to a career in acting or hosting game shows.

Asked if being 76 affects how he thinks about what remains of his music career, Rundgren said,

“I’m aware of it. I am particularly aware of it because of what happens around me. At 76, as you can imagine, I’ve lost a lot of friends. At some point, I realized that it’s something I have to get used to. But that means that you’d better get busy making more friends.

“I don’t have retirement plans,” he said. “I don’t have a sort of a menu or bucket list or anything like that of things I feel like I have to do. I just go from record to record.”

Rundgren said that the biggest challenge at this stage of his career is not repeating himself.

“I have written over 300 songs,” he said. “How do you come up with something new and interesting that isn’t just nonsense? You know, that it isn’t just do-do-do-dah-dah-dah?”

Well, it worked for the Police.

When I told him how excited people in these parts are for his concert, he started singing an impromptu rendition of “Indiana Wants Me” by R. Dean Taylor.

Unlike the protagonist of that song, Rundgren will be welcomed with open arms instead of a call to them.